Cable Forum - View Single Post

**Hugh** · 15-07-2020, 08:12

Quote:

Originally Posted by nomadking

NRs problem wasn't deposit-loan ratio. When they sold on the loan, it was not that different to the mortgagee repaying the loan, because they sold the house or took out a mortgage elsewhere. That mortgage was no longer on their books. If a loan has been repaid, it no longer figures in any deposit-loan ratio.

---------- Post added at 22:55 ---------- Previous post was at 22:52 ----------

People lie about their outgoings, and the capital was the property, especially with houses prices increasing. In the US, mortgage brokers were falsifying documents in order to "earn" commission.

I worked for a UK sub-prime lender (2003-2007, approx. £3 billion market cap) as Head of Technology, then for a year as IT Programme Manager for Barclays Capital - your interpretation is not congruent with actuality.

Quote:

With half a decade’s hindsight, it is clear the crisis had multiple causes. The most obvious is the financiers themselves—especially the irrationally exuberant Anglo-Saxon sort, who claimed to have found a way to banish risk when in fact they had simply lost track of it. Central bankers and other regulators also bear blame, for it was they who tolerated this folly. The macroeconomic backdrop was important, too. The “Great Moderation”—years of low inflation and stable growth—fostered complacency and risk-taking. A “savings glut” in Asia pushed down global interest rates. Some research also implicates European banks, which borrowed greedily in American money markets before the crisis and used the funds to buy dodgy securities. All these factors came together to foster a surge of debt in what seemed to have become a less risky world.

Start with the folly of the financiers. The years before the crisis saw a flood of irresponsible mortgage lending in America. Loans were doled out to “subprime” borrowers with poor credit histories who struggled to repay them. These risky mortgages were passed on to financial engineers at the big banks, who turned them into supposedly low-risk securities by putting large numbers of them together in pools. Pooling works when the risks of each loan are uncorrelated. The big banks argued that the property markets in different American cities would rise and fall independently of one another. But this proved wrong. Starting in 2006, America suffered a nationwide house-price slump.

The pooled mortgages were used to back securities known as collateralised debt obligations (CDOs), which were sliced into tranches by degree of exposure to default. Investors bought the safer tranches because they trusted the triple-A credit ratings assigned by agencies such as Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s. This was another mistake. The agencies were paid by, and so beholden to, the banks that created the CDOs. They were far too generous in their assessments of them.

tl:dr - the companies that were supposed to provide oversight and manage risk didn’t in the chase for profits and bonuses.